I want to make a PCB for a keyboard. I made the schematic and after I imported the component in the PCB editor I want to arrange them. I watched a tutorial and the guy have a pretty big grid and when he selects “Move with reference” the software allows hims to select the corner of the component. This is not possible for me, when i try to do it, the software allows me to only select the point on the grid, but the components are not correctly positioned on the grid. You can see in the screen shot.
When I position footprints I always use for it their own anchor point. I have never tried to select reference point just at some graphic lines.
It is possible that KiCad exact behavior in this aspect little changes from version to version.
Recently I have seen some posts from which I can suppose that V9 with big grid disturbs you when trying to select something off grid. I don’t remember such posts when V5,V6,V7,V8 was used.
Check what KiCad version is used in tutorial you watch?
After you have selected “Move with Reference” hold the “Ctrl” key down whilst moving the mouse. When the crosshairs are in the exact position you want, left click the mouse THEN release the Ctrl. key. The cursor will move to the grid but as soon as you move the mouse, the cursor will reposition itself to the place you require.
Whenever you move or drag anything, holding the Ctrl key down disables the Grid.
I’m pretty sure this is the case for any Editor in Kicad.
I didn’t moved to V9 yet (and don’t know if will do it).
It looks that problem is V9 specific.
If you can clearly show it is a bug then report it.
It is wise to check in advance whether the problem occurs in the latest test version as it could be fixed.
There were several post on this subject recently so may be someone reported it.
The first thing is:
Those components are not drawn correctly.
You shouldn’t have an “Edge cuts” box around the component. It will trigger errors, and even if it worked, it would result in the component being cut out of the board.
That said…
The Move tools are definitely borked in 9.02 and 9.03. None of the snaps get highlighted, although the ruler tools work correctly.
Hi, thanks for being involved in this topic. For me anything that I changed in Kicad v9.x settings, did not worked. I also tried the 9.0.4 version (the latest) and the behaviors is still the same. For me, the version 8 of Kicad is working good and is also good enough, so I will keep it for the moment.
These are the setting I have in both v8 and v9, I don’t know why it behaves different.
There are several settings that influence snapping behavior. I see you have Snap to graphics set to Always. That’s one setting, and that is good in this case, but there are more. One part of it is that sometimes snapping behavior for graphics is only for the currently active layer. Although a test in V8 I just did the Move with Reference also snaps to graphics on different layers. I’m not sure of further details about this.
A different approach is to just snap to a pad of your keyboard footprints. As long as you use the same pin for each key, it does not matter much. The only difference is that the whole keyboard would be shifted a bit relative to the “paper” canvas. This does make it easier for you because you don’t have to use the "move with reference, but can just grab each key by a pin with the most default snapping behavior.
Are you aware there are scripts available to generate key positions for keyboards in KiCad?
Regarding the points that no one else has commented on,
if I were to look at the first screenshot, I would start by changing the settings in the red box.
This isn’t directly related to your question, but it’s an example of a setting that will make things easier before you move.
Yeah, it’s none of those things.
It’s the “Magnetic Points” setting.
I changed everything you suggested, and nothing helped. Changing Magnetic Points to “always” fixed the issue.
